The Guardian
Grace Dent was an immediate convert to Amy Poon’s relaunch of the family’s restaurant brand in the New Wing of Somerset House, declaring it simultaneously “sweet, confident, feminine, ballsy and glamorous – a lot like Amy Poon herself, in fact. This family has had restaurants in its bones for many generations, so why stop now?”.
The food was “refreshingly light, delicate and, you might even say, wholesome”, including crunchy house pickles and a bowl of crudites with a “pungent, funky, fermented tofu dip” that alone was worth booking a table for.
The only disappointment for Grace was a duck salad that “felt oddly drab; there wasn’t a lot of duck or soy dressing, and it was a bit heavy on the cabbage”.
Grace Dent - 2026-01-04Daily Mail
Tom Parker-Bowles was equally taken by the latest Poon’s, hailing it “a cracker… a new modern Chinese classic” that displays a lightness of touch “so often so absent in many British Chinese restaurants”.
‘Magic soup’, he said, lived up to its name and was “the most pure and gentle of broths, ‘to soothe, restore and nourish’. It has a mellow fruitfulness that makes you want to gulp it by the gallon.” Unlike Grace, he gave the cold roast-duck salad the thumbs-up as “light and lithe and lovely, with lots of crunch and bite, and a perfectly judged acidity”.
Tom also visited the new central London home of Crisp Pizza, having avoided the legendary Hammersmith original on the basis that a three-hour wait was “two hours and 55 minutes too long” for pizza.
He thoroughly approved of its new host venue, the Marlborough pub, freshly restored by the team behind the Devonshire. And did the pies live up to the hype? A resounding Yes: this was “exceptionally fine pizza, in the New York style but very much Crisp’s own creation. Meaning the base is crisp and crunchy, but never dry, the crust charred and splendidly brittle,” while the toppings were notable for “the sheer quality of the ingredients”.
Tom Parker Bowles - 2026-01-04The Times
Jay Rayner took a mixed view of Amy Poon’s revival of the family restaurant name, in a “beautiful space” in Somerset House that “reflects the elegance of Amy herself”, though to Jay it felt “like a Chinese restaurant for people who don’t always feel comfortable in Chinese restaurants”.
The food offering, unfortunately, was “as uneven as a cobbled track”, featuring both “great highs and thudding lows”. The highs included a whole steamed seabass which was “an expert piece of fresh and pearly fish cookery”, plus silky-skinned wontons, toasty chili paste and wind-dried meats that were in effect a “brand extension” of Amy’s mail-order business.
The lows ranged from “weirdly tasteless [and] extremely expensive” prawn toast, “sad, limp and lifeless” roast duck salad, and a dessert featuring “two shamefully bad pieces of mottled and fibrous mango”, to – possibly worst of all – a total absence of stir fries which left the restaurant feeling “like a joke without a punchline” (“perhaps”, Jay offered by way of excuse, “the problem is the building, where naked flame is banned)”.
Jay Rayner - 2026-01-18
